Item 1. Business
Item 1. Business
Overview
Planet’s mission is to use space to help life on Earth, by imaging the world every day and making global change visible, accessible, and actionable. Planet’s Class A common stock and warrants are listed on the New York Stock Exchange (“NYSE”) under the symbols “PL” and “PL WS,” respectively.
What: We image the Earth every day at medium- and high-resolution. We collect this powerful data set from the hundreds of satellites we have in orbit, making our fleet the largest fleet of Earth observation satellites in history, which we design, build, and operate. We have over 2,400 images on average for every point on Earth’s landmass, creating a non-replicable historical archive for analytics, machine learning, and insights.
Why: Our satellite data and analytics reveal actionable insights regarding a large array of important phenomena, such as deforestation, agriculture, climate change, biodiversity, and supply chains worldwide. Our daily stream of proprietary data and machine learning analytics, delivered over our cloud-native platform, helps companies, governments and civil society use satellite imagery to discover insights as change happens.
Who: We currently serve over 880 customers across large commercial and government verticals, including agriculture, mapping, forestry, finance and insurance, as well as federal, state, and local government bodies. Our products serve a variety of diverse customer needs. For example, our products help farmers make decisions that result in significant increases in their harvests, while using fewer resources, by timely alerting them to changes happening within their fields. Governments use our data to provide transparency and to promote peace and security addressing issues from national security to food security. Mapping companies use our data to keep online maps up to date. Also, journalists and human rights organizations use our data to uncover and report the truth about events in hard-to-reach places.
How: Our customers can embed our Earth data and change detection products into their workflows to better inform their real time decision-making processes. Our historical archive of global, daily imagery data enables back-testing of predictive analytics, which is particularly relevant for time-series forecasting, an important area in machine learning.
Planet is a scaled business with $191.3 million in revenue for the fiscal year ended January 31, 2023, and the largest fleet of Earth-observation satellites in history. We generate revenue primarily by selling licenses to our data and analytics to customers over an entirely cloud-based platform via fixed price subscription and usage-based contracts. Most of our revenue is recurring in nature. We use a “one-to-many” data subscription model, as each image we capture can be sold an unlimited number of times. We believe this is different from legacy Earth observation providers who typically sell individual images exclusively to a single customer.
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Public Benefit: Our business model is aligned with our mission and public benefit purpose: to accelerate humanity toward a more sustainable, secure and prosperous world by illuminating environmental and social change. We are dedicated to the continuous pursuit of creating an unbiased, scientifically accurate, and trusted source of data about the changing planet.
Corporate Developments
We were incorporated under the laws of the state of Delaware on December 15, 2020, under the name dMY Technology Group, Inc. IV, a blank check company (“dMY IV”). On December 7, 2021, we consummated a business combination transaction (the “Business Combination”) with Planet Labs Inc. (“Former Planet”), as a result of which Former Planet merged with and into dMY IV, and we changed our name to Planet Labs PBC and became a Delaware public benefit corporation.
Industry Overview
For decades, legacy commercial satellite data providers and governments captured Earth imagery via large high-cost satellites that took years to design and manufacture and resulted in complex data sets that only governments and large enterprises could afford or interpret. We believe two global economic shifts are fueling a need for a greater volume of and more rapidly delivered Earth observation data: the digital transformation and sustainability transformation of the global economy. We believe we can capitalize on these economic shifts by providing valuable Earth data that businesses and governments can utilize to better measure and monitor change in physical assets, and facilitate and accelerate these transformations.
Historical Satellite Data Services: The Earth Observation industry was historically created by governments focused on using Earth imagery for intelligence and scientific purposes. As a result, the commercial sector had limited access and Earth Observation providers prioritized serving national defense and intelligence customers before attempting to sell excess capacity to the commercial market. High launch costs, long development cycles, and the one-off nature of the products further limited the attractiveness for commercial growth. This began to change in the last ten years as a global increase in space investment has resulted in lower average launch costs, technological innovations in electronics, new market entrants, and product-driven entrepreneurial companies leveraging the commoditization of cloud computing to grow data platform businesses.
Sustainability Transformation: Organizations globally are increasingly focused on reducing their environmental impact and operating more sustainably. We believe this has increased opportunities in early-stage venture funding for clean tech companies and climate tech investments. Further, driven by public sentiment and a growing focus on sustainability by investors and stakeholders with evolving views on fiduciary duties, regulators have recently begun imposing Environmental, Social & Governance (“ESG”) goals on select large companies, and we believe formal legislation to more strictly enforce sustainable business practices may be adopted in the future.
Digital Transformation: Organizations across industries are driving operational improvements and taking advantage of new growth opportunities by leveraging third-party data, their own proprietary data, and Artificial Intelligence (“AI”) technologies, all of which is driving a digital economic shift across many sectors. In addition, as more organizations digitize their workflows, it is increasingly important to deliver solutions that are cloud-native to take advantage of the cost savings and scale derived from cloud technologies.
Peace & Security: Organizations such as governments, Non-Governmental Organizations (“NGOs”), media and think tanks are tackling growing global challenges on a daily basis. We believe the issues facing the world are becoming increasingly more complex, and that our satellite imagery and tools can help enable unbiased, factual, and real-time reporting and decision making by governments, NGOs, media and think tanks. Further, we believe the near real-time pictures from space that we provide are critical to global transparency and encourage increased peace and security.
Overall, we believe these transformational shifts are driving organizations to better manage these risks and drive new growth strategies by having near real-time understanding of the impact of global changes across the Earth. The
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first step for organizations undergoing the digital and sustainability transformations, as well as those seeking to establish and maintain peace and security, is to understand context and consistently measure and monitor relevant data. With shared context and metrics, we believe that businesses and governments can improve operational efficiency, resource allocation, risk mitigation, and strategic decision making with data-enabled applications.
Our Opportunity
Our founding team built Planet on the concept of agile aerospace methodology. This has enabled us to leverage parallel innovations in AI, computing, and cloud-based storage to house and analyze a distinctive data set of daily Earth changes, and to build market-leading tools to help customers extract value. This has also enabled major improvements to the cost-performance of satellite manufacturing, ground stations, and mission operations.
We believe we are well-positioned to help power the digital and sustainability transformations with our extensive whole-Earth data set and robust analytic capabilities which are optimized to measure human activity and its interaction with the environment and delivered through our cloud-native platform. By providing this analytic ready data to our partner ecosystem as well as our end customers, we believe we can expand the use cases we can address across industries at scale. We believe globally consistent and reliable satellite imagery data is a critical component that can fuel the impact of these economic transitions in every major vertical sector.
We believe enabling major industries to make data-driven decisions using remote sensing data is central to the transition of the existing geospatial sector and creates a large market opportunity to advance the digital transformation and sustainability trends in society, business, and in the public sector. We see market opportunities in industries including:
Agriculture: Our data can enable precision agriculture, harvest planning, directed scouting, crop monitoring, sustainable agricultural monitoring, irrigation and pasture management, and soil and moisture management. Our data can also help monitor sustainable agriculture practices.
Civil Government: We perceive forest health monitoring, agriculture monitoring and food security, protection of biodiversity, ecosystems and parks, water conservation and efficiency, permitting and code enforcement, disaster management, geo-mapping, and smart city planning, among others, as significant potential drivers of this opportunity.
Defense & Intelligence: Governments are strategically engaging with commercial space and remote sensing companies to leverage sharable, unclassified subscription products to complement more traditional defense and security industrial solutions. In addition, we believe geo-mapping foundation data, maritime domain awareness, humanitarian and disaster recovery, and natural resource monitoring are examples of the many potential drivers of this opportunity.
Energy & Utilities: We view infrastructure and asset monitoring, proof of permit and code enforcement, air and water pollution monitoring, spill and disaster management, and earth data for geo-mapping services associated with these use cases, among others, as significant drivers of this market opportunity.
ESG-related Industrial / Supply Chain: We see ESG-related regulations, investor risk assessments, consumer expectations, and brand reputation pressures as significant factors driving requirements for leading Consumer Packaged Goods companies to track and publish ESG targets. Tracing and measuring sustainable sources for supply chains are expected to become a fundamental business metric for these organizations and drive market adoption, which also includes supplying data for mapping services related to infrastructure. Other significant drivers of this opportunity may include carbon footprint management and air and water pollution monitoring.
Finance and Insurance: We believe there are broad opportunities in this segment including investment research, portfolio risk assessment and management, and insurance and reinsurance products. For example, improvements in measuring and predicting outputs from the world’s natural resources has the potential to help optimize the efficiency of commodity trading markets, which could have significant macroeconomic implications.
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Forestry: We believe commercial forest management and disease and pest monitoring, and the geo-mapping data required to monitor change, among other opportunities, are likely significant drivers of this market.
Our Operations
Our Fleet: We continue to iterate our satellites and operations for optimal efficiency and function, using our own production capabilities, as well as third-party suppliers and subcontractors. Information about risks related to our satellite operations appears in the “Risk Factors” section of this report.
Sales: Our global sales organization operates directly and via our extensive network of hundreds of partners around the world. Our partner network consists of solution providers, OEM partners, and GIS Platform companies that have deep expertise in building last-mile vertical solutions using satellite imagery and geospatial data. Our partner ecosystem bolsters our global presence with regional and domain-specific expertise, as well as expands our market access to more users.
In addition, our sales organization includes sales representatives as well as dedicated customer success and technology support teams. Key responsibilities for our direct sales organization include acquiring new customers, maintaining relationships and expanding business with our existing customers, and ensuring contract renewals. At the center of our sales philosophy is a strong feedback loop between our sales organization, customer success, and product development teams, which we believe helps to inform our technology roadmap and better serve our customers.
We work closely with our customers and partners to enable their early success, both from an account management and technical management perspective. Deeper adoption from our customers comes in many forms, including more users, more area coverage, and more advanced software analytics capabilities.
Marketing: Our marketing team utilizes a multi-channel approach to develop and increase our brand awareness and position, and communicate the value of our differentiated offering, and develop engaging outbound demand-generation campaigns.
We utilize an end-to-end buyer’s journey approach to develop awareness and lead-generation activities that engage and nurture prospective customers and expand opportunities within our installed base of customers. The team drives our overall market positioning and messaging across our key audiences and vertical markets, as well as provides strategic go-to-market assessments of use cases that emerge from new product capabilities and the market landscape. Our communications team also works with targeted influencers and media outlets to drive interest through earned and owned media channels, including blogs, social media, and video.
Research and Development: Our research and development (“R&D”) team consists of software and hardware R&D for product discovery, technology incubation, and go-to-market planning. Our R&D scope includes teams leveraging the rapid development in AI, machine learning, and the evolving information technology architecture for massively distributed data collection, storage, and analysis. It further includes our investments in our agile space missions, which includes advancing core spacecraft technologies, automated mission operations for our satellite fleet and ground stations, payload prototypes and development, and engineering operations to drive potential scale efficiencies. Our R&D team at Planet is also responsible for developing and innovating our proprietary technology platform.
We continue to invest in R&D, particularly as it relates to building software solutions on top of our data to help make our platform more accessible to a wider range of customers, as well as innovating our space technology to capture valuable and differentiated data sets.
Technology Partnerships: We engage in partnership programs and strategic efforts to embrace open innovation, technology infusion and market-shaping opportunities. These programs include initiatives such as our Education and
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Research Program, our partnership with Carbon Mapper, our partnerships with Telesat and SES as part of the NASA Communications Services Project (“CSP”), among others.
Our Technology Platform
Our leadership position is driven by our distinctive approach to technology. The experience of Planet’s founders at NASA instilled a deep expertise for major systems engineering projects, an understanding of the power of technology, and a mission to use space to help life on Earth. Since our founding, we have built capabilities across three deep core competencies, each operating together to accelerate the digitization and sustainability transitions. These include (1) Agile Aerospace; (2) Proprietary Big Data; and (3) Our Platform and Analytics.
Agile Aerospace: We are a pioneer in “agile aerospace” — the rapid development and deployment of new space-based hardware and related software systems. This is similar to the agile software approach of releasing early and often to rapidly iterate capabilities, but applied to space. By harnessing trends in miniaturization, we have built, launched, and maintained hundreds of compact, powerful satellites at a significantly lower cost than traditional aerospace companies, an improvement that we believe is similar to the transition from the mainframe computer to the desktop computer. In January 2023, we announced the successful launch of 36 “SuperDove” satellites. These 36 satellites joined our existing fleet of satellites in orbit, positioned strategically around Earth to capture our proprietary daily data set .
We believe making powerful satellites in small packages has enabled us to launch many more satellites than our nearest competitor. It enables us to design missions that were unheard of even a few years ago, such as our daily data set delivered via our satellite fleet. It has further allowed us to rapidly innovate — resulting in more and better data for our customers, as compared with historical data satellite services. We believe this model helps to drive the expansion of our platform and customer base and inform what future data sets to collect, creating a virtuous cycle. We also believe it enables us to quickly address emerging market requirements ahead of other providers.
Proprietary Big Data: Our technology is designed to put the power of knowledge about the Earth into the hands of more people. Our aerospace innovation has enabled us to maintain the world’s largest fleet of imaging satellites in history, with the capability to image the world every day. This has enabled us to generate a proprietary, vast data archive that grows daily.
With our fleet of satellites, we are able to collect unique and proprietary global data every day and high-resolution data of a specified location up to ten times per day with agile tasking. Once the raw data is collected, our machine learning and AI capabilities are married with remote sensing science to automate the data processing and produce analytics-ready, whole-Earth data.
Using and contributing to open data standards via the Open Geospatial Consortium, our cloud-native proprietary technology, autonomously performs critical processing and overall harmonizing of images for time series and for use in data fusion and analysis. We collect hundreds of millions of square kilometers of Earth data every day, collected over the Earth’s landmass and some areas of water. Our deep data archive is used to train our models, an important asset for delivering useful insights.
Our fleet of satellites enables us to provide proprietary data solutions, including: (1) Planet Monitoring, (2) Planet Tasking, and (3) Planet Archive. Descriptions of each follow.
Planet Monitoring: Our satellites work together to create an always-online scanner for the planet with the goal to image the Earth everyday at a resolution (Ground Sampling Distance, “GSD”) of up to 3.5 meters. This allows our customers to monitor any areas of interest, discover trends, and gain timely insights — and is the backbone to our one-to-many business model.
Planet Tasking: With high-resolution satellites in orbit and our rapid revisit capability, we can capture a specified location up to ten times per day at a resolution (Ground Sampling Distance, “GSD”) of up to 50 centimeters, one of
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the highest cadence fleets in orbit today. The agile tasking satellites, all powered by an application programming interface (“API”), can perform multiple imaging modes, including points, long strips, stereo collects, and video.
Planet Archive: We have collected an average of 2,400 images for every point on Earth’s landmass. These images are added to our archive of proprietary Earth observation data dating back to 2009 and daily Earth scanning data dating back to 2017. This immense historical archive is impossible to go back in time to re-collect, and represents a significant competitive advantage.
Our Platform and Analytics: Our automated, cloud-native platform processes and manages our proprietary data catalog and extracts useful information to deliver to our customers. Our platform is built for speed and flexibility, enabling customers to efficiently access, discover, and build solutions at scale. With tens of thousands of users on our platform, from researchers to government agencies, we aim to continuously improve the user experience to speed up the mission utility and business value for our customers.
Through our platform and analytics products, we offer customers a variety of capabilities, including the following:
(1) Planet APIs: We provide APIs for searching our historical archive, ordering imagery, tasking high-resolution satellites, as well as providing hosted imagery streaming services directly from our platform. With Planet APIs, developers can quickly and easily integrate satellite imagery into their applications and workflows. Many customers use Planet imagery to power web applications and large data pipelines.
(2) Planet Apps: We have developed proprietary web applications that make it easy to work with our geospatial data. These applications enable customers to order through our platform, perform real-time image correction, monitor areas for change over time, work with analytics, and create and store easy-to-use artifacts. Given the high volume and quality of our imagery and historical archive, our proprietary web applications provide an optimal platform to access our data.
(3) Planet Basemaps: Using proprietary algorithms on our daily global imaging, we build basemaps from the most recent imagery over broad areas. Our machine learning algorithms select the best pixels from hundreds of thousands of scenes, removing clouds and transforming the images into visually consistent and scientifically accurate basemaps that empower AI-ready time-series analysis. We create global basemaps monthly and deliver custom basemaps to our customers for selected areas and times.
(4) Planet Fusion: Planet Fusion combines Planet Monitoring with other scientific-grade radiometric data from public satellite data programs, including NASA/USGS-Landsat and ESA/EU Copernicus, to provide customers with a stream of consistent Earth data, using a predictive algorithm to fill gaps and remove clouds, the result of which enables valuable time-series analyses. The pre-processing and data harmonization provided by Planet Fusion often eliminates the need for additional processing before a customer can run advanced analytics on the data, which helps makes satellite imagery analysis easier and practical for a wider audience.
(5) Planet Analytic Feeds: We have built automated, cloud-native, global-scale analytics on top of our data set and made them accessible by APIs and web applications. Our analytic feeds use the latest AI and machine learning techniques for a broad range of land-classification, object-detection, and automated change detection capabilities, from road and building detection, ships, planes, oil well pads, and more.
(6) Planetary Variables : We produce and offer Planetary Variables by combining observations from Planet’s satellites and broader observations from a range of public satellite constellations. Our goal with these products is to capture and quantify the changes in dynamic systems such as soil water content, land surface temperature and vegetation biomass and forest structure, and render that information to the people on the ground tasked with making decisions.
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Our Customers
Our customers may subscribe to daily data feeds covering their areas of interest. Prior to Planet, specially trained technical imagery analysts typically had to hand-process satellite data that was months out-of-date. Now, we are able to deliver content directly to customers’ decision-support tools daily through automated interfaces.
We are committed to building deep relationships with our customers by providing easy access to critical geospatial data and analytics in a consumable, digestible format. In addition, with our subscription services and data products, customers can monitor and detect changes and create insights that can help drive timely decision-making, and improve operational efficiency, resource allocation, and risk assessment and mitigation.
We have a proven record of building customer relationships, with over 880 customers across the globe, including leading agriculture, mapping, forestry, finance and insurance companies, and government agencies. We provide solutions for a diverse and growing set of customer use cases, from crop yield and variable rate seeding improvements in agriculture to emergency response, permitting, and code enforcement in government, to depletion measurements and sustainability monitoring in forestry.
Our performance is subject to a number of variables, and as such, we cannot assure you that our results will continue in the same trajectory as our historical results, nor can we assure you that our results will be indicative of our future performance. For more details, please read the section entitled “Risk Factors.”
Our Competitive Position
We are a proven innovator with multiple compounding competitive moats across our technology platform. We believe we have a differentiated offering, offering high-cadence imaging of the whole Earth’s landmass, creating significant barriers to entry. We have a scalable business model enabled by a one-to-many use of imagery, in turn leading to an attractive financial profile. Finally, we have an experienced management team.
Our competitive moats include agile space mission capabilities, proprietary big data, and platform analytics. Our advanced space systems enable the capture of comprehensive, high quality, proprietary data, which power our platform, enhanced by advanced analytics that utilize AI and machine learning to provide solutions to our customers. We believe as customers derive more value from the platform, they increase their usage by incorporating insight from our data into their workflows and analyses. This creates a feedback loop that drives our technology roadmap, from the high-level analytics and end-user applications all the way down the stack to new sensors in space to capture valuable information for our customers.
Differentiated Offering: We believe we are the only company in the geospatial data industry producing a daily scan of the landmass of the Earth. We combine this capability with our high-resolution satellites, which our customers can task to capture a higher resolution image of a single site multiple times per day. We believe we have the highest commercially available intraday revisit capabilities.
Barriers to Entry: We were one of the earliest next generation commercial geospatial companies, and we believe our agile aerospace innovations and fully operational fleet of Earth-imaging satellites have put us years ahead of the competition. Unlike other emerging Earth observation providers who are just now establishing operational satellite fleets, we already have hundreds of satellites in orbit as well as a comprehensive platform for data processing, delivery and image data integration to enable customers to realize value from our satellite data. As a result, we believe we have higher operational efficiency, more extensive proprietary historical data sets, economies of scale in data storage and processing, and proven execution by our global sales organization. With a strong first-mover advantage through our daily earth scans, we believe we are well positioned to capture this market and continue innovating ahead of emerging players.
Scalable Business Model: We have recurring subscription- and usage-based revenue contracts, which provide visibility into potential future growth. Because we can sell our imagery data and analytics to multiple end customers, we believe our solutions enable us to capture market share across broad vertical markets.
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Attractive Financial Profile: With our one-to-many business model, our margins improve with economies of scale, as there is low marginal cost to sell incremental access to our data. Once we capture and process an image to make it analytics ready, it could be sold to any customer, any number of times, on our platform.
Experienced Management Team: Our management team has deep expertise in scaling software, data, and space technology. In addition to their technical knowledge, our team has extensive experience operating and leading companies and a strong track-record of building market making businesses.
Our Growth Strategy
We seek to unlock and maximize the value of our data for organizations globally by making it easier to use and consume by more users: from data scientists to analysts, policy makers, and decision makers — by integrating critical geospatial data directly into their own workflows and analytic models and to drive favorable outcomes. Key elements of our growth strategy include:
Scaling in Existing Verticals: We plan to invest in sales, marketing, and software solutions to expand within our existing customer base and further penetrate vertical markets in which end users are early adopters of geospatial data, such as civil government, agriculture, defense and intelligence, and mapping.
Expansion into New Verticals: We plan to invest in software to make our data more actionable and accessible to a larger group of customers and users, including non-geospatial experts such as data and business analysts in companies. We believe this will help us address use cases in key emerging markets such as energy, infrastructure, finance, insurance, and consumer packaged goods. We also intend to partner with companies building vertical market solutions, such as independent software vendors, as well as business intelligence and analytics providers. While we have customers and partners today in many of these verticals, we believe an increased investment in developing software analytics solutions and enhancing our data to meet the needs of vertical market solution providers has the potential to accelerate our data and analytics usage across more end users.
Continued Investment in Data Products: We plan to scale and expand our existing products by building on our machine learning and computer vision capabilities with remote sensing techniques to fuse multiple data sources. These products allow our customers to consume simple, actionable time-series tabular data within their existing workflows. We intend to create many of these key data sets in collaboration with our partners who have deep vertical expertise and make the data sets available to any user of our platform.
Establish Platform Ecosystem: We plan to further develop our ecosystem of users and partners to build solutions leveraging our data and platform and to build software tools and APIs that make it even easier to do so. By developing a robust applications ecosystem, we believe we can create a network effect, potentially accelerating our growth and deepening our market penetration.
New Sensors & Data Sets: We plan to make strategic investments in building new sensors to capture additional data sets from space. As we grow our customer base and the use cases we can address, we believe we can better understand what additional data sets our customers are eager to access and therefore which sensors might enable us to capture additional data that is valuable to such customers. By leveraging our agile aerospace approach to space systems, we believe we are well-positioned to introduce new Earth observation sensors into orbit to capture new types of data with greater capital efficiency and speed than other satellite data providers. Having these capabilities can deepen our value proposition to customers and help us both acquire new customers and expand our offering to existing customers.
Strategic Acquisitions: We have made strategic acquisitions, including the acquisition of the BlackBridge group of companies in September 2015, the Terra Bella business from Google in April 2017, Boundless Spatial, Inc. (“Boundless Spatial”) in March 2019, VanderSat B.V. (“VanderSat”) in December 2021 and Salo Sciences, Inc. (“Salo Sciences”) in January 2023. We continue to evaluate opportunities to make acquisitions that can accelerate our growth strategies and complement our existing product offerings.
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Our Competition
Competition in Satellite Imagery: We see the satellite imagery industry as mainly divided between incumbents, such as Airbus and Maxar, and next generation players, such as BlackSky, Satellogic, and CG Satellite. Incumbents have typically hosted a limited number of active satellites which operate on a one-to-one tasking system. These satellites are typically very high cost with very high resolution, best suited for government use cases. Incumbent satellite data providers have primarily served national governments and other traditional satellite imagery industries, often with tight integrations into the classified systems they serve.
Next generation satellite imagery companies have developed satellites that are lower cost and smaller in size, and have a stated ambition to increase the presence of their fleets within Earth’s orbit. These providers have indicated that they intend to use and process the data that they capture in order to provide analytics to customers. As of the date of this report, we believe the scale of our satellite fleet, revenue, and business exceed the next-generation satellite data companies that compete with us.
Competition in Data Analytics: We also compete with data analytics platforms that use geospatial data from a variety of sources to provide analytics services to their customers. These companies include Orbital Insights and Earth Daily,
Many data analytics providers rely on partnerships with satellite imagery companies in order to source the data necessary to run their analytics platforms. We partner with a number of these companies to provide data for their platforms for certain use cases while also providing analytical tools and services directly to our own customers. We believe these relationships are advantageous to us over the long-term, as they enable new opportunities.
Our Public Benefit
We believe that Planet’s data, products and services are valuable tools for responding to critical global challenges, informing more ecologically and socially sound decision-making, and measuring and reporting the results. Across the world, climate change and biodiversity loss are disrupting and destabilizing many of the systems on which humanity depends. It is intensifying disasters such as floods, fires, and storms, impacting agricultural productivity and food security for millions of people, and decreasing the habitability of our planet. Businesses, governments, NGOs, and civil society must all act to address these challenges. But they need accurate, timely, and trusted data.
Given the economic, social, environmental and geopolitical implications, we believe it is imperative that we maintain wide access to our data, products and services. As we grow our business, we will continue to scale our efforts to work with NGOs, philanthropies, governments, intergovernmental bodies, civil society groups, journalists, scientists, and others to make sure that our data is made as widely accessible as possible to inform critical efforts in conservation, climate, public affairs, humanitarian response, and human rights.
To serve these goals, we operate as a Delaware public benefit corporation. Our mission and business model are tightly aligned with our public benefit purpose: “to accelerate humanity toward a more sustainable, secure, and prosperous world by illuminating environmental and social change.”
By enabling access to trusted, accurate, and actionable data about our changing planet, we believe we will help facilitate more effective decisions, accelerate the transition to a sustainable economy, enhance global security through greater transparency, and strengthen civil society. In doing so, we not only seek to help the world address urgent planetary crises but to build the regenerative systems that will lead to a more flourishing and resilient world. We believe that the most impactful and profitable way to build our business is to ensure that this public benefit remains at the core of our company’s DNA in perpetuity — informing and driving what we create for planet Earth and all its inhabitants.
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Our Ethical Commitment
We recognize the potential impact of the technologies we create, and continue to develop a robust set of applied organizational principles, policies, and processes by which we evaluate their ethical use.
This system begins with a series of ethical principles, including core commitments to non-exclusivity, accuracy, humanitarian risk reduction, and the protection of privacy and confidentiality. We seek to deeply embed and socialize these principles within our company’s culture, and to build processes and policies to apply them consistently.
The purpose of a good ethical system is to enable its users to navigate dilemmas in which there may be complex tradeoffs between choices in a given circumstance. Such programs mature but are never “finished”, as new questions and contexts continually arise. We therefore continue to commit ourselves to the active development of our ethics program.
Our People
We are a diverse, passionate team of creative individuals that solve hard problems and strive to make an impact every day. We invest in a culture of learning, teaching, and dialogue, work together to deliver insight to our customers, bring our all, own our mistakes, and build for the future. We aim to identify, recruit, retain, incentivize and integrate our existing and new employees, advisors and consultants, because we believe our people are our most important assets.
As of January 31, 2023, we had a total of approximately 1100 employees, including approximately 930 full time employees, working across 25 countries worldwide. None of our employees are represented by a labor union, though in some countries our employees may be subject to industry-wide collective bargaining agreements as a matter of law. We have not had any work stoppages and consider our relations with our employees to be good.
Well-being
One of our top priorities is to maintain the health and well-being of our employees and their families. To achieve this goal, we offer robust and comprehensive health, welfare and retirement benefits for our employees, including medical, dental, vision, flexible spending accounts (FSA) and health savings accounts (HSA), life insurance, short- and long-term disability, paid time off, various voluntary insurance programs, parental assistance, tuition and work from home reimbursements, a robust employee assistance program (EAP) and a 401(k) retirement plan. We also conduct bi-annual employee satisfaction surveys, in addition to feedback cycles.
Following the coronavirus COVID-19 outbreak, we have taken numerous measures to protect the health and safety of our employees, including shifting many employees to remote work and adopting internal policies around flexibility, work from home expenses, and extra time off. To encourage flexible working and better work-life balance, we maintain a soft-closing policy during two weeks of the year, and have adopted a "flex-Friday” policy which gives all of our employees one extra Friday off every month. We also conduct virtual meditation and yoga classes and other well-being programs throughout the year.
Compensation and Advancement
To ensure a compelling total rewards philosophy and practice, we have policies in place to monitor and deliver fair and equitable compensation to employees based on their role, contribution, and performance. In addition, we offer eligible employees equity awards to align their contribution to the Company with a share in our financial success.
Our employees and the people we are seeking to hire value growth and development. We provide opportunities to grow and develop through work experiences, mentorship programs, personal development experiences, training and tuition reimbursement. To help our employees navigate their careers, we also maintain a job architecture program,
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which we believe creates transparency about career development within our organization and helps facilitate discussions around career growth.
Inclusion
We believe that a strong, dynamic workplace only exists where people with diverse backgrounds and experiences are empowered to share their values and perspectives, challenge themselves with new ideas, and think critically on difficult questions. We advance open communication, creativity, diversity, and inclusion strategies across our company and are constantly trying to connect and build communities internally within our organization and externally.
Our Intellectual Property
Our IP portfolio includes patents covering novel features of our spacecraft, trademarks identifying the Company and various products, copyright ownership of the imagery archive, and trade secrets related to manufacturing and operations.
We own the copyrights for the imagery captured by our spacecraft. These images measure in the millions per day and are unregistered. We occasionally will license imagery under the Creative Commons for promotional purposes, but otherwise imagery is licensed pursuant to commercial license agreements.
We treat our know-how in the design, manufacture, and operation of spacecraft, ground based data relay, image processing, analysis and platform systems to be proprietary.
Seasonality
We have experienced, and expect to continue to experience, seasonality in our business and fluctuations in our operating results due to customer behavior, buying patterns and usage-based contracts. For example, we typically have customers who increase their usage of our data services when they need more frequent data monitoring over broader areas during peak agricultural seasons, during natural disasters or other global events, or when commodity prices are at certain levels.
Government Regulations
Our industry is highly regulated due to the sensitive nature of satellite technology. Additionally, we contract with numerous U.S. government agencies and entities. We must comply with, and are affected by, laws and regulations relating to the formation, administration and performance of U.S. government and other governments’ contracts, including foreign governments. The laws and regulations governing our business and operations, including the distribution of satellite imagery, may change in the future. Our business and operating results may be materially and adversely affected if we are required to alter our business operations to comply with such changes or if our ability to sell our products and services on a global basis is reduced or restricted due to increased U.S., E.U. or other government regulation. This risk is heightened by the geopolitical relevance of our data, which can shed light on sensitive operations around the globe. However, based on information available to us, we don’t expect that our continued compliance with current government regulations, including environmental regulations, will have a material adverse effect upon our capital expenditures, earnings or our competitive position. Additional information about the regulations affecting our business and the related risks appears in the “Risk Factors” section of this report.
Available Information
Our internet address is www.planet.com . The information contained in, or accessible through, our website does not constitute a part of this report. We make available free of charge through our website our annual reports on Form
10-K, quarterly reports on Form 10-Q, current reports on Form 8-K, proxy statements, registration statements and amendments to those reports filed or furnished pursuant to the Securities Exchange Act of 1934, as amended (the “Exchange Act”) as soon as reasonably practicable after we electronically file such material with, or furnish them, to
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the SEC. The SEC maintains a website that contains reports, proxy statements and other information regarding issuers that file electronically with the SEC. These materials may be obtained electronically by accessing the SEC’s website at www.sec.gov.